For two and a half millennia, Mesopotamian cosmology saw the world as a multi-story universe. Wayne Horowitz (Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography) summarizes:
“Sumerians and Akkadians understood the universe as consisting of superimposed levels separated by open space. From above to below, the levels were: a region of heaven above the sky where the gods of heaven dwelled, the starry sky, the earth’s surface, the subterranean waters of the Apsu, and finally the underworld of the dead” (xii).
This cosmology was understood, Horowitz argues, as a literal physical geography: “Gilgamesh really believed that they too could have visited UtnapiStim by sailing across the cosmic sea and ‘the waters of death;’ or if a few, many, most, or all ancient readers understood the topographical material in Gilg. IX-X in metaphysical or mystical terms” (xiii).
For the most part, the early peoples of Mesopotamia did not think emphasize the “uni” of the universe. Most Akkadian and Sumerian terms for the totality of things describe either “the sum total of things” or express a bifurcation between heaven and earth: “both Sumerian and Akkadian materials speak of the entire universe in terms of its two constituent halves, ‘Heaven and Earth’. Most common are Sumerian an.ki and the Akkadian equivalent samu u er$etum, but other more poetic pairs are also attested including Sumerian” (xiii) - pairs not unlike the “heaven and earth” of Genesis 1.
The division of sacred and profane appears to be built into the nature of things. What does it mean, then, that we so easily speak of a unified cosmos, a uni-verse? How did this revolutionary neologism come to be common sense?
